After the abortive attempt to paint Kristina Leung as the evil female Fu Manchu / Dragon Lady, the New York Times is raising the heat on China again:
With unemployment high and American manufacturers reeling from three years of misery, politicians and businesspeople around the country have found a villain to blame for these troubles: China, or more specifically its currency.Whee! And the front page story is followed up with an even more lurid story on the abuse of urban migrants.
I don't mean to defend China's abysmal human-rights record, and I don't mean to necessarily approve of the billions of dollars in trade deficits with the U.S., but I mean, come on: pot, kettle, black.
Meanwhile, as the war on Iraq -- I'm so sorry, I forgot the war was already declared over -- becomes more grim for American troops, President Smirk pulls out the same tired crap about "the struggle between civilization and chaos:"
We've adopted a new strategy for a new kind of war. We will not wait for known enemies to strike us again. We will strike them and their camps or caves or wherever they hide before they hit more of our cities and kill more of our citizens. We will do everything in our power to deny terrorists weapons of mass destruction before they can commit murder on an unimaginable scale.In Iraq's case, those WMDs were denied indeed.
We've sent a message that is understood throughout the world: if you harbor a terrorist, if you support a terrorist, if you feed a terrorist, you're just as guilty as the terrorists, and the Taliban found out what we meant.Saudi Arabia must be quaking in its boots.
Afghanistan today is a friend of the United States of America. Because we acted, that country is not a haven for terrorists, and the people of America are safer from attack.Man, you can practically see him rehearsing in front of a mirror, looking at the way his lips move: "...Must mention 'friend...' must mention 'the people of America...' See Spot run. Run, Spot, run."
America and our coalition removed a regime that built, possessed and used weapons of mass destruction, a regime that sponsored terror and a regime that persecuted its people.This is somewhat new, as "WMD" is back (he had initially changed it to "weapons program"), but now that the media's attention has shifted to Gov. Arnie and the Ten Commandments (Chief Justice Moore can put it in his living room), he can confidently bring up WMDs again.
In all the debates over Iraq, we must never forget Iraq.Uh-huh.
We are on the offensive against the Saddam loyalists, the foreign fighters, and the criminal gangs that are attacking Iraqis and coalition forces.Yup -- that's a lot of people there, and it's increasingly clear that "the coalition forces" have no idea who they are, where they're coming from, who's financing them. The war is over, indeed...
We're receiving more and more vital intelligence from Iraqi citizens, information that we're putting to good use.Obviously not good enough.
Our course is set. Our purpose is firm. No act of terrorists will weaken our resolve or alter their fate. Our only goal, our only option, is total victory in the war on terror. And this nation will press on to victory."Total victory" can only mean total annihilation in this case, which seems like the sum of the Bush administration's plan for "the war on terror."
Learning by rote is never very effective, but maybe these cheap-labor conservatives know what they're doing. Bush has no new talking points in this speech, except for the deliberate omission of Osama bin Laden. Indeed, it could practically have been delivered a year ago, and the rhetoric would have been similar. WMDs, war on terror, America will prevail, with us or against us, blah blah, completely ignoring everything that has happened since then -- a brutal and expensive war, an even more unstable world order, a rising death toll since Bush squeezed into his flight uniform, more proof (as if anyone needed more) of a tanking economy. (All this is happily abetted by some of the most retrogressive policies in education, social welfare, the environment -- the outrage goes on and on...)
Posted by the wily filipino at August 28, 2003 07:05 AM